In 1821, an elderly Goethe listened to a twelve-year-old pianist and declared that the boy made the young Mozart he had once heard sound like a prattling child. This episode explores Felix Mendelssohn’s pressure-cooker upbringing: a family that fled Hamburg in disguise after his banker father undermined Napoleon’s blockade, a Berlin salon where the Humboldt brothers and Europe’s intellectuals came to dinner, a brilliant sister Fanny forbidden from a public career whose songs were published under Felix’s name, a secret baptism at age seven, and a father who demanded the family erase the Mendelssohn name in favor of Bartholdy.

The conversation follows his teenage explosion of creativity, from thirteen string symphonies written for a private home orchestra to the Octet at sixteen and the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture at seventeen, then his revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion at age twenty, his celebrity in Britain under Queen Victoria, the founding of the Leipzig Conservatory, and his fierce clashes with Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner and Meyerbeer. It closes with the hidden turmoil behind the polite Victorian image, including nervous collapses and desperate letters to Jenny Lind, his death at 38 months after Fanny’s, and the anti-Semitic campaign by Wagner that helped dismiss him as a writer of pretty wedding tunes until scholars like Charles Rosen restored his reputation.

• How Mendelssohn quietly rebelled by printing both names on his visiting cards and mocking Bartholdy with Fanny
• What made the Midsummer Night’s Dream overture the invention of the romantic concert overture
• Why the Bach revival was a self-aware act by a man of Jewish descent restoring the greatest Christian music
• The nuanced conservatism behind his E minor Violin Concerto: romantic emotion built on classical counterpoint
• How Wagner’s pamphlet and later critics like Shaw hijacked his legacy for over a century